


something else to it

by flyingtortoisetoes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eridan Ampora Being an Asshole, Homophobic Language, Humanstuck, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Internalized Homophobia, Love/Hate, M/M, Minor Sollux Captor/Aradia Megido, Minor Sollux Captor/Feferi Peixes, Past Relationship(s), Slice of Life, Sollux Captor Being an Asshole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28097232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingtortoisetoes/pseuds/flyingtortoisetoes
Summary: That's just how it started between you and Eridan, you guess. With no actual hostility and a begrudging tolerance for each other at best.
Relationships: Eridan Ampora/Sollux Captor
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	something else to it

**Author's Note:**

> this is an old fic of mine. i deleted it and decided to rework it and idk i kinda like it i guess

The first time you saw Eridan Ampora you hadn't even turned six years old. 

There was no epiphany. No heart-stopping, swooning revelation. None of that "love at first sight" bullshit. In fact, there weren't really any actual feelings at all. Back then he was just a guy. He was just annoying, stuck up Eridan with the poor eyesight and the snide comments, whom it never occurred to you to pay any attention to. Then again, now that you think about it, it never really occurred to you to pay much attention to that pretty girl he always hung around with, either. And look where that got you. You guess what you’re trying to say is you were six years old. No guy pays much attention to any girl when they're six, whether they think she's pretty or not.

It was pretty straightforward at the beginning. There weren’t any complicated, embarrassing hormonal vacillations quite yet. In fact, you and Eridan didn’t even interact one on one. There wasn't any need to. You weren’t friends, you didn't run in the same circles, so what was the point? And, of course, there wasn't any of that fire in him yet that you would later grow so dependent on. Sure, you and he were opposites in every regard of the word, but there was never any real animosity between the two of you back then. That's how it started between you and Eridan, you guess; with no actual hostility and a begrudging tolerance for each other at best. Things between the two of you could probably have been different, you probably could have made something work, but neither of you really cared enough to try. And for a while, that was just fine with the both of you.

Once you started middle school, things began to change. Pretty quickly you decided that you didn’t like Eridan. He was an ignorant tool, and you hated the way he looked down on everyone else, but to be honest, you knew the ignorant shit that came spewing out of his mouth wasn’t personal. He wasn’t like that, he wasn’t really a personal guy. He was just an ass, which didn’t really give you a good reason for why hating him the way you did, but something about him just rubbed you the wrong way. All that aside, for some reason whenever anybody asked why you hated him so much, you were never able to look them in the eye. Maybe it's because you'd started to wonder if you actually didn't like him or if there was something else to it.

The day after your thirteenth birthday, you’d started to pay more attention to girls. More importantly, you’d started to pay more attention to the pretty girl Eridan was always hanging around with. You’d found out from a friend that her name was Feferi Peixes and that, like Eridan, she was disgustingly rich. But you found out for yourself that, unlike Eridan, she didn’t have the personality of a festering pile of shit. 

You liked Feferi, you really did. She was cheerful, polite, everything that Eridan wasn’t. And you liked hanging out with her, too. She was real easy-going and pleasant to be around. Of course, there was also that feeling you’d get in your gut—the tingly one that gave you a rush of adrenaline—whenever you stole her away from Eridan, but you swore up and down to yourself and to anybody who would listen that you liked Feferi for who she was, not because it was so delightfully clear that Eridan hated you for it. 

Pretty soon after you and Fef went on your first date, you asked why a nice girl like her would let such a pretentious asshole like Eridan Ampora hang around her all the time. She had just looked at you with a small, wide smile and told you that she was Eridan’s best friend and he didn’t have anybody else. She told you that he needed her. You let the topic drop after that. She never said if she felt the same way about him, and you never asked. 

You didn’t need to.

Eventually, your feelings for Feferi faded, and the two of you made the mutual decision to end the relationship when you started high school. You had a very mature conversation and ended things on good terms. Much to Eridan’s chagrin, and therefore your delight, you remained friends with Feferi and made time for each other often.

Your older brother’s accident happened when you were fourteen. Allegedly, the only witness was his best friend at the time, Gamzee Makara's older brother. But Kurloz never spoke out loud, and you weren't sure if you would press him for the details even if he did. He always did spook you a little bit. So needless to say, no one knows what really happened that day, and you're willing to bet that no one ever will.

As much as you hate to admit it, you were embarrassed to be associated with Mituna. Even before the accident, interactions with him were already a bit of a gamble, but afterward, he was more loud, inappropriate, and unpredictable than ever. He could and would explode at any time without any warning, and then when somebody got upset, he’d splutter out a couple of half-assed apologies that you knew he didn’t really mean. You think it was those pathetic, empty apologies that pissed you off the most, that made your blood really come to a boil almost as much as Eridan Ampora did.

Funnily enough, it was your hatred for the Amporas that spurred you to attempt to reconnect with Mituna. Granted, you reached out to him only after you’d overheard Eridan’s asshole older brother Cronus call Mituna a retard, but you figure that the Amporas deserve at least some credit. If they weren’t such callous pieces of shit, you probably wouldn’t have the relationship with your brother that you have today. 

Later you found out that Mituna had turned Cronus down after being subjected to several of his advances, which is what prompted Cronus to call him a retard in the first place. Naturally, you could never let Eridan live that down, so you did what anyone else in your situation would have done; taunted him mercilessly. Day in and day out you would rib Eridan for his brother being a fag. (Hey ED, how's your brother doing? Still kissing boys? Oh, that's cool. God, tough break that he's such a homo, huh? Sucks that he’s had such shit luck with girls he’s had to turn to sucking cock. But hey, at least now the two of you've got something in common now.) You know he resented you for it, but there was nothing he could say to get you back for it, not when he knew you’d kick his ass if he ever brought up Tuna. 

He knew he couldn’t argue with you, so he never did. He’d just stand there like an idiot and splutter some self-righteous idiocy about how any Captor “would be so lucky” for an Ampora to even bother wasting a second of their precious time on them, after which you would always laugh and wait for Eridan to realize what he’d just said. It never took long. 

About a month before you turned sixteen, you went to your first high school party. After pining after her from a distance for longer than you’d care to admit, you'd finally gotten the guts to ask Aradia Megido out on a date. You asked her what she wanted to do, and she said she wanted to go to this house party she'd already been invited to. You’d never been to a real party before, and if you got to show up with a girl as pretty and cool as Aradia, you were more than willing to oblige. Although you guess Aradia Megido always ends up getting her way somehow. 

Unfortunately, once you got to the party you were faced with two shitty facts. The first one being that it was Eridan Ampora's party at Eridan Ampora’s house, and the second one being that Aradia had left you standing alone in the Amporas’ front room so that she could get drunk and go make out with Equius Zahhak. If there’s one thing you can’t stand, it’s the feeling of being used, and that night you couldn’t shake the thought that Aradia had been using you to get to Equius. You know now that it was a ridiculous thought. Aradia could have gotten to the party with or without you. And, as you later found out, Zahhak had ended up slipping something in her drink because apparently, he thought drugging her was the only way to get her to fall in love with him. The dude’s all kinds of fucked up, and you would kick his ass if you could, but he’d kill you if you tried, so the best you could do was send him some of the apeshit bananas computer viruses you were working on. But the point is, at that moment you just wanted to get the fuck out of there, but Aradia had been your ride, so the next best thing was to find somewhere less crowded. So you’d made your way up the ridiculously large staircase and slipped into the first unlocked room you came across. At this point, the only thing you really wanted to do was to just go home and immerse yourself in horrendously violent video games for the next twenty hours straight, so when you realized that you had just stepped into Eridan’s bedroom, you were just about ready to blow your brains out. 

Eridan didn’t notice you at first. He was facing away from you, looking out his window, with what looked like some sort of stuffed animal under his arm. It would have been so easy to just walk out and forget about it. Or, better yet, to mock him, and you could already feel the beginnings of an insult laying heavy on your tongue. But… as entertaining as it usually was to push Eridan’s buttons, something about seeing Eridan slouching on his bed—such a stark contrast from his normally stick-straight posture—and facing away from you, staring out his window, made you hesitate.

Unfortunately, what with your shit luck and all, you hesitated just one moment too long, and Eridan turned around. 

You often find yourself wondering what would have happened if you’d just walked out. Usually, you come to the conclusion that it would have been a lot easier for you if you did, and that both you and Eridan would have avoided a lot of really terrible shit, most of which still haunts you to this day, but there’s no use in thinking about any of that because you didn’t turn around. Not even when he sneered at you and told you to get lost. You’re just some sort of sadomasochist with a fucked up habit of emotional repression, you guess. 

You should have listened to him. 

You should have just left the room when he told you to and you should have just forgotten how his eyes looked so deep and melancholic. How they looked kind of like a calm, dark sea, so deep you were convinced you could drown yourself in them. They were shining with unshed tears. 

You owed Eridan nothing. You and he both knew that, and yet you ignored his snide, passive-aggressive comments and sat beside him on the edge of his garishly large bed. You were silent while he sniffled softly and wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, all while shooting resentful glares at you, trying to be threatening you guess.

Only when you were certain he was done crying, you asked him what was wrong. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t give you a straight answer, instead baring his teeth at you and saying if you didn’t get out of his room that instant he’d beat the shit out of you. How he _ought_ to beat the shit out of you.

You told him good-naturedly that he wasn’t going to be beating the shit out of anyone, and you stayed put. Then you asked him what was wrong again. 

He was silent for a long time. Long enough for you to get to thinking and realize you were probably making a big mistake. Right when you were about to tell him he was taking too long and you didn’t really give a shit why he was crying like a girl, he sighed. It was long and heavy, loaded with exhaustion and something else you couldn’t quite place. It was the sigh of a fifteen-year-old boy who was so inconceivably and heartbreakingly alone.

He told you that he was miserable, that he hated his life. You had frowned at that and told him to stop being a selfish prick. How could he possibly hate his life when he could have anything he could ever want, financially speaking? He just scowled and called you an asshole. He told you that isn’t what he meant, not that a scum-of-the-earth shitbag Captor like you would ever understand. He didn’t want to live the life he’d been living anymore, he explained to you. And that he didn’t care if he lived or if he died, so long as he didn’t have to keep doing the same mundane horseshit he’d been doing.

You hadn’t understood what he meant back then. When you looked at Eridan Ampora that night, you didn’t see a teenage boy who was growing up too fast and who was wise beyond his years, educated by the throes of self-hatred and uncut fear. You didn’t see that side of him until later. No, when you looked at him that night you still saw an arrogant asshole with more money and a bigger house than he knew what to do with. 

He also said he hated his father, who was mean as all hell, and that he was fucking terrified of ending up like Cronus, pathetically alone and laughingly depraved. You didn’t know what to say to that, so you didn’t say anything. You just listened to him speak until he ran out of breath, which was when he cursed softly and said he didn’t want to talk about his family anymore. You said that was fine by you. After a few moments of loaded silence, he took a shaky breath, composed himself, and asked you if you wanted to get high. 

You’d never gotten high before, and you never imagined you’d be getting high with Eridan Ampora for your first time, but you shrugged anyway. 

Fuck it, you told him.

After you both made it clear that neither of you knew how to be moderate in your substance use, you lay side by side with Eridan on the ground, staring up at the ceiling. 

You felt a sort of warm, cottony feeling, like your insides were turning to pudding and your head was way up in the clouds. It wasn’t a particularly bad feeling. You sort of liked it, you decided, and smiled loopily to yourself. 

It had taken you a few minutes to realize Eridan had been saying your name. When you finally did, you turned your head to look at him, and studied his profile instead of paying attention to whatever nonsense only a stoned fifteen year old could come up with.

You’d never noticed that he had a splash of light freckles across his nose. Or how deep the circles under his eyes were. You wondered if he got enough sleep. You hoped so. It made you kind of sad, thinking about Eridan up all night, counting down the minutes until the sun would come up and he could get out of his own mind.

This close to him, you could see that he had already started to grow facial hair. It wasn’t much, but he had a few thin hairs above his lip that he hadn’t learned to shave yet, and you felt vaguely jealous. You’d always been a late bloomer, and puberty, apparently, was just one more thing Eridan was able to one-up you at. Nevertheless, you found yourself wanting to reach out and run your finger along his upper lip, and in your dazed, hormonal state, you almost did. The only thing that stopped you was what Eridan said next. 

Captor, he told you, the two of us really could’ve been friends. 

When he turned his head to look at you, whatever childish retort you had come up with died in your throat. Your nose couldn’t have been more than an inch or two from his. You hadn’t ever been that close to anyone, not even Feferi when the two of you had dated, much less a boy. 

It took you a minute to tear your eyes away from his, and when you did, you laughed nervously, not sure what else to do. 

Whatever, he muttered, it doesn’t matter anyway.

He sighed heavily and his eyes fluttered closed. 

You went back to watching him. He was right. It didn’t matter.

Then he told you that he’d never hated anyone more than he hated you in his entire life, not even his jerkoff father or his sorry excuse for a brother. He said that you’re a snarky piece of shit and that everything about you, from your lisp to your stupid glasses to your weird, freaky eyes, pissed him off. 

But, he said, I sorta like that it pisses me off I guess.

And goddamn if that didn’t feel like a genuine confession, then you don’t know what does.

It was at that moment when all of a sudden you realized that you felt something for Eridan. You weren’t sure what exactly it was that you felt. It certainly wasn’t love, and you didn’t necessarily think it was hate, either, but it was something. And that something made your pulse quicken and your stomach twist and turn with nervous butterflies, so when Eridan looked away from you, embarrassed, you gently slid your fingers over his jaw. He froze, didn't move a single muscle, but he didn’t push you away, either. He didn’t start yelling and hitting, so you waited a moment, made sure he wasn’t going to kick you out of his house.

And then you kissed him.

The two of you were pretty much done talking at that point.

The next few interactions you had with Eridan after that were nothing if not complicated. The first of these instances was at school, where Eridan had mocked your lisp in front of the whole class while you were giving a presentation. You flipped him off and told him to eat shit, and you were both promptly sent to the front office. 

The second instance was that following weekend. You’d bumped right into him at the movie theater just as he was turning a corner, and you don’t remember what had happened next, but somehow you ended up behind the building, Eridan on his knees and your back pressed against the wall, hands gripping his hair. It was the first time you'd gone that far with him, but it certainly wasn't the last. 

One night when he’d snuck over to your house to fool around, he seemed different. The banter and the no-strings-attached dynamic that had formed easily between the two of you weren't there in the same way they had been over the previous month. After, when you tried to kiss him, he stopped you and asked you just what the fuck the two of you thought that you were doing. 

You rolled your eyes and asked him what that even meant, but a tiny seed of fear was planted in the back of your mind. You were fairly certain you already knew what he meant.

He stared at you, face unreadable as ever, but this time his lack of anger didn’t make you feel like you’d beaten him, it just made you feel like you’d done something wrong. 

_What are we, Sol?_

You’d honestly been expecting him to ask a question like that at some point, but when he finally did, you were still a little taken aback. You hadn’t realized that you had to be something to each other, and you told him as such. 

He looked away and you watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed thickly. Then he told you, in a quiet voice, that you were something to him.

You laughed it off and tried to kiss him again. This time when he stopped you, you told him to stop being a selfish little bitch and that you hadn’t been hanging out with him because you had some sort of homo crush on him. 

_You aren’t anything to me,_ is what you had said to him, not yet knowing that you were lying through your teeth.

He was quiet for a while, giving you enough time to realize you were wrong and that he did mean something to you, but it was too late. He was already telling you to go fuck yourself. 

You watched as he put his clothes on and left through the window, trying to ignore that guilt that was settling over you. 

It was the last day of school before summer break when Eridan finally approached you in the hall. You hadn’t spoken to or even seen much of him since that night at your house, and in a weird sentimental way, you found yourself missing him. 

You told yourself you weren’t going to rile him up. That you were going to be the mature one this time. But you took one look at him and couldn’t help yourself. He made himself such an easy target.

You smirked at him when he stopped by your locker, his arms folded across his chest. 

_Miss me, ED?_

The words had left your mouth before you could even think about them.

He told you to shut the fuck up and that he wasn’t afraid to punch you out right then and there.

You were still smirking, but you did shut up because if Eridan did end up socking you, you figured you wouldn’t hit him back. Just this once. You figured you owed him that, at least.

He looked you right in the eye and told you that Feferi had said she didn’t think they should be friends anymore and that she’d broken things off with him. He said she was the one thing he had going for him in his life, the one constant he could always count on, and now he didn’t even have her. 

You asked him tiredly what the fuck that had to do with you and he had practically snarled. He threw a pointed, pained glance at the photo you had proudly taped on the door of your locker, the one with you and all your friends together one day at lunch. You felt your heart squeeze painfully when you realized that, with the exception of Aradia, _they had all been his friend first._ You’ll never forget the look on his face when he told you he hated you.

At that moment you could’ve told him you were sorry, or that you missed him, or that even though he was a despicable douche you still dreamed about him. It all would have been true.

But you didn’t tell him any of that. Instead, you told him it’s not your fault that nobody wants to waste their time with him, and that he’s a clingy piece of shit who takes everything too personally so no wonder the two of you didn’t work out.

You could have seen the punch coming from a mile away, but you took it anyway. Just like how you figured you would.

Now you’re nearing your twenty-second birthday. You haven’t spoken to Eridan in five years. Like some sort of sick twist of fate, the two of you ended up going to the same college, and every once in a while you’ll see him around campus, but you never speak. When he looks at you, it’s almost as if he doesn’t remember. 

He looks happy, you think to yourself when you do see him. He’s got new friends now and—although it isn’t any of your business, not really—a boyfriend, or so you’ve heard. But even though you feel a pang of sadness whenever he’s around, you’re glad that he’s happy. He deserves it.

Still, sometimes you catch yourself wondering if you’d just had a conversation with the guy instead of telling your friends just how badly you wanted to sock him in the mouth, you would have recognized and come to terms with the complicated feelings you had for him sooner and if instead of actually socking you in the mouth, Eridan would’ve just had a conversation with you, he’d realize that he felt the same.


End file.
